The achievements of Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo were, even during a period of unprecedented artistry, out of the ordinary. Born in Brescia around 1480, he radically reimagined Christian subjects. His surviving oeuvre of roughly fifty paintings – from the intensely poetic Tobias and the Angel to sober self-portraits – represent some of the most profound work of the period.
In Painting with Demons, a beautifully illustrated book and the first in English devoted to the painter, Michael Fried brings his celebrated skills of looking and thinking to bear on Savoldo’s art, providing a stunning contribution to our understanding both of the early modern European imagination and of the achievement of this underappreciated artist.
Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. A renowned critic and historian, his previous books include The Moment of Caravaggio (2010).
Introduction
PART ONE
1 The Death of St Peter Martyr
2 Hands
3 Faces
4 Magic
5 The Brescia Adoration of the Shepherds
PART TWO
Breathing the same air
Savoldo and the self-portrait
Faces, masks, Northern art
‘Magic’, ‘influence’, demons
Who, then, was Savoldo?
Savoldo and Caravaggio – the inescapable relation
Afterword
References
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index